Field Of Dishonor

Gravity returned suddenly. Not the 1.35g of her home-world, but the much lighter gravity of Grayson, and she looked over her unencumbered shoulder. Captain Brentworth stood beside the gym's control panel, gri

"Agile little devil, isn't he?" Alvarez's captain said.

"He is that," Honor agreed. She reached up and ran a fingertip over one tufted ear, and Nimitz paused—briefly—in his chewing to push back against her touch. Then he got back to important matters with a juicy crunch.

Honor laughed and lifted him down into her arms. Skin-suits might be far lighter than older styles of vac gear, but their internalized storage vacuoles made them much more massive than they looked, and Nimitz's suited weight was too much for comfort even in this gravity. The 'cat didn't care about the change; he only curled comfortably in her embrace and clutched his celery tight, and her smile turned into a grin. Nimitz was comfortable enough with the suit now, but he'd bristled indignantly when she first introduced him to the plumbing co

She started to bend over to remove the gravity booties, but one of Brentworth's crew was already there. The barely postadolescent electronics tech went down on one knee, offering the other knee as a raised platform, and she smiled as she lifted one foot to the proffered support. He unsealed the booty and laid it aside, then repeated the process on her other foot.

"Thank you," she said, and the youngster—he couldn't have been over twenty T-years old—blushed.

"My pleasure, My Lady," he got out, and she managed not to chuckle at the near-awe in his tone. Not that she'd been particularly amused when she first encountered the reverence in which Brentworth's crew held her. They watched her almost worshipfully, with a deference they normally would have offered only to the Protector himself. It had a

Still, she thought, it might have been easier all around if she weren't the only woman in Alvarez's complement of eight hundred. She'd never encountered that situation before, either, but up until three T-years ago Grayson women had been legally barred from military service... or from owning property, serving on juries, or managing their own money, for that matter. It would be a while yet before they started serving on warships.

She nodded again to the youngster who'd helped with the booties, then settled Nimitz's weight more evenly in her arms and headed for the hatch, and Brentworth fell into step beside her.

The Grayson captain studied her profile in silence as they headed down the passage. She looked better than he'd dared hoped, but now that she'd been aboard a couple of days he was begi

She turned her head and caught his expression, and he blushed as one of her crooked smiles showed she'd followed his thoughts. But she only shook her head at him, and he smiled back.

This was a very different woman from the one he'd seen defending Yeltsin's Star. She'd been driven and grim, then—unfailingly courteous but with cold, naked steel in her one good eye while ghosts of pain and loss twisted deep inside her. She had, he thought, been the most dangerous person he'd ever met as she placed her two damaged ships between the battlecruiser Saladin and a planet full of people who weren't even allied to her Kingdom. People who'd done their best to humiliate and denigrate her for daring to insult their prejudices by wearing an officer's uniform. She'd gone up against a warship more than twice as massive as both her own wounded ships for that planet, and she'd lost nine hundred of her people stopping it.

That memory still shamed him... and explained the reverence with which Alvarez's crew regarded her. He felt it himself, but he knew her better than most, for he'd been on HMS Fearless's bridge as her liaison officer when she did it, and he snorted in sudden laughter.

"What?" she asked, and he gri

"I was just thinking, My Lady."

"About?" she prompted.

"Oh, about how amused you probably would have been when your steward came aboard."

"Mac?" One eyebrow rose. "What about him?"

"Well, it's just that he's a man, My Lady." The other eyebrow rose in sudden understanding, and she began to chuckle wickedly. "Absolutely," Brentworth agreed. "It came as, er, something of a shock to some of our people. I'm afraid we're not quite as liberated as we'd like to think just yet."

"Lord, I can imagine!" Honor's chuckle turned into soft laughter. "And I can imagine the way Mac reacted to it, too!"

"Oh, no, My Lady! He took it perfectly in stride—just looked at them like a Sunday school teacher who'd caught a bunch of adolescents telling dirty stories in the head."

"That's exactly what I meant. He saves the same sort of look for me when I'm late for supper."

"Does he?" Brentworth laughed, then nodded slowly. "Yes, I can just see him doing it. He's really attached to you, My Lady."

"I know." Honor smiled fondly, then shook her head. "By the way, Mark, there's something I've been meaning to mention to you. You're a senior captain yourself, now. There's no reason you have to go on 'My Ladying' me all the time. My name is Honor."

Brentworth almost missed a stride in sheer shock. Grayson society was barely begi

"I—My Lady, I don't know if—"

"Please," she interrupted. "As a personal favor. You don't have to do it in public if you'd rather not, but all these 'My Ladies' and 'Steadholders' are suffocating me. Do you realize there's not a single person aboard this ship who would dream of calling me by name?"

"But you are a steadholder!"

"I haven't been one all my life," she replied a bit tartly.

"Well, no, I know that, but—"

Brentworth broke off to struggle with his emotions. One part of him was immensely flattered, but it wasn't as simple as she seemed to think. As he'd said, she was a steadholder, and the first and only woman to hold that high office in Grayson's thousand-year history. She was also the only presently living holder of the Star of Grayson and the person who'd saved his planet. And last but not least, he admitted, there was her sharp-edged, intriguing beauty.

She didn't look a bit like a Grayson woman, and she was ten T-years older than he was, but his body had been fully mature, too old to respond to the prolong therapies when Manticore made them available to his people. That meant she looked ten T-years younger than him... and his hormones were disrespectfully aware of her apparent youth.

Her strong, triangular face, with its exotically slanted eyes, owed nothing to classical beauty, but that didn't matter. Nor did the fact that she was easily fifteen centimeters taller than most Grayson men, and other, deeper changes made her attractiveness even more noticeable. She was... happier, more relaxed, than he'd ever imagined she could possibly be, and she seemed far more aware of her femininity. She'd never worn a trace of makeup in Yeltsin, even before she'd been wounded; now understated, skillfully applied cosmetics enhanced the graceful strength of her face, and the hair which had been close-cropped fuzz fell almost to her shoulders, instead.